Games people play: Microsoft acquires FantasySalesTeam to help cos incentivize sales teams

Microsoft has acquired Incent Games Inc., the developer and owner of FantasySalesTeam, an innovative sales gamification platform that’s helped companies boost sales on productivity, drive revenue and improve CRM adoption through collaboration and team based competition. The benefits of this feature will be available for Microsoft customers to help incentivize their sales teams.

Bob Stutz, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics CRM notes in his blog that incentive programs and contests are leveraged in almost all sales organizations, most suffer from common shortcomings: the same top performers almost always win and rest of the team tends to disengage fairly quickly once they realize theu’ve fallen behind or out of competition.

FantasySalesTeam brings in an innovative twist that combines gamification with fantasy sports and applies it to a sales setting.Their platform is highly effective at increasing team collaboration, productivity and consequently driving greater results and business growth. Through team-based competition and involvement of non-sales employees (such as managers, service, operations, marketing and finance) employees “draft” teams and become truly invested in each other’s success. Individual and team results become highly visible, driving both competition as well as collaboration and creating positive, impactful cultural change.

In the coming months, Microsoft will integrate and offer this service to their customers and will continue to support customers using FantasySalesTeam with other CRM solutions.